Justice committee  I share that opinion with my colleague Kerry, and I want to ask Kerry if she would like an opportunity to speak to that. That is my opinion and the opinion of the Pivot Legal Society.

Justice committee  Yes, we are opposed to that principle, on the basis that it's going to recreate the same harms that came up in Bedford.

Justice committee  Let me clarify my answer. First of all, I don't think what I was describing was a sex worker being susceptible to charges. The question from Mr. Goguen was about what is stopping a sex worker from being able to advertise. The answer is that a person she is retaining to do the a

Justice committee  I understand that this is your vision, Mr. Dechert, but if that vision is not actually expressed in the legislation, who is to say that it is—?

Justice committee  The letter expresses our concern that the bill as designed is not going to achieve positive effects, but is actually going to have unconstitutional effects in much the same manner that the laws before Bedford had. I think this is a rallying call for people in the legal profession

Justice committee  The course of these things can take years. The Bedford case and the case that I was also involved in, brought by Downtown Eastside Sex Workers United Against Violence, took seven years. So a brand new case could conceivably take up to that long. I think that two things to point

Justice committee  And provided that the service is not provided in the context of a commercial enterprise. So we don't know that a sex worker operating independently as a person who advertises her services is not a commercial enterprise. She's making a commercial benefit from selling her sexual se

Justice committee  That's not what the exception of the commercial enterprise says though. If that's what the government intends--

Justice committee  —it should make clear that the material benefits section, where it says—

Justice committee  —received the benefit in the context of a commercial enterprise that offers sexual services for consideration, falls under the exception. Subsection 5 does not apply to a person who commits an offence under section 1 if that person received the benefit. It simply says “commercial

Justice committee  That's exactly how I read it as well, that the party that would be captured under that provision would be the host of the advertisement, not the sex worker herself. It would be the entity, or the website, or the newspaper publisher who would be captured because they are doing the

Justice committee  That would stop them from going inside because one of the problems with that provision is that, like the provision you were discussing with Professor Bruckert, it's not actually well-defined what the government intends to capture by that provision. Like many portions of this bi

Justice committee  I think it's quite correct that you can't look at a single aspect of the law and not understand how it's going to work with the other aspects. The notion of this law, as we've heard from members of the government, is that it wants to abolish prostitution entirely. One thing we

Justice committee  It's over five years. It's insufficient, and it's not going to do the things that people might imagine it will do to provide services and opportunities and strategies for people not to enter prostitution. If this government wishes to address the issues that lead to people havin

Justice committee  No, I'm going to—